Complementing my previous post, a lot of great thoughts in this post about invisible work from Hardik Pandya:

When the project succeeded, her work had dissolved into the project’s infrastructure. The doc was just “the doc.” The tracker was just “the tracker.” The alignment was just how things were. People forgot it had ever been otherwise. That’s the thing about good coordination. I’ve realized that when it works, it disappears. You can’t see it precisely because it worked.

Even though Pandya didn’t call that out, it’s worth highlighting that his “founder friend” example wasn’t a woman by pure chance; often the invisible work becomes the second shift of women in the workplace. And then:

The problem is that recognition follows narrative. When a project succeeds, credit flows to the people whose contributions are easy to describe. The person who presented to the board. The person whose name is on the launch email. The person who shipped the final feature. These contributions are real, I’m not diminishing them. But they’re not more real than the work that made them possible. They’re just easier to point at. Easier to put in a slide. And I think that’s where the unfairness starts, slowly, without people really noticing.

However, I disagreed with these parts:

There’s no framework that fixes this. You can’t design a rubric that captures “held the project together.”

Wait, why not? This is a similar challenge to quantifying design contributions (some of which might not clearly map to KPIs or sometimes even OKRs). You can’t measure being in the flow, true user satisfaction and frustration, or world-class-adjacency of taste. But it doesn’t mean you cannot design a system or a rubric that recognizes and talks about them.